The Red Bandanna

by Tom Rinaldi

  For the father, the picture calls forth a simple one-word caption. In the boy’s posture, in his open face and eight-year-old frame, in his smile and his lean forward, it’s already there, in the cells of his being—the attitude and the code, the call and the reply.

  Two syllables. One word.

  Ready.

  II

  WHAT WOULD YOU DO IN THE LAST HOUR OF YOUR LIFE?

  Where would you be?

  What would it look like?

  Who would remember it?

  If you could know, would you want to? Would you receive that knowledge with dread, or accept it with grace? Would there be a peace to be gained, or one already granted?

  If you understood the mortal clock, what would you trade to gain another hour, and then another after that? What prayer would you recite, what deal would you make, what promise would you offer, for this not to be the end?

  Look upon the common fears of what your final hour might be. Take the typical conditions and likely circumstances. You know them, you’ve seen them, you’ve lost others to them. The ebbing mind or failing body. The loss of family and lack of purpose. The fact of pain or the regimen of medicines. In a home not your own, in the prisons of old age, receiving the full force of its sentencing, there might be a mercy in the dulling of your intellect. After seven or eight or nine decades, maybe the final hour feels like reward.

  But imagine it’s sooner. It’s an instant from now, one blink from current, it’s the line after the line you’re reading. The decades haven’t stacked like wood for the winter, and the years haven’t collected in enough albums. You haven’t reached any golden age, or twilight time. You’re not winding down or scaling back, not going gray or getting slow. You’re not there yet. You’re not close. You’re not old.

  For you, legacy is a distant and irrelevant word; it’s for obituaries and sports columns. You’re twenty-four. You’re ready. You’re young. The hours are yours, until the last one arrives.

  If you knew this might be that time, this could be the end, this may be the very last hour you have to spend, what would you do?

  And what if the hour, with all its horror and loss, its panic and shock, still somehow gave you a choice—to fly from risk, to escape, to live?

  What would you do, then, in the last hour of your life?

  • • •

  Blue.

  So deep it was an occasion.

  The vault of sky that morning was boundless and crystal, a shade so brilliant it would set the day, and after, pierce its memory.

  The night before, a cold front pushed down from Canada and swept across parts of the East Coast, carrying rain and thunderstorms with it. Fresh cool air came behind, bringing unclouded skies the next dawn.

  After the humidity and swelter of August, the morning was unseasonably cool, a gift to everyone stepping outside. Winds were gentle, and temperatures were in the low 60s at seven A.M. in the city, and predicted to climb no higher than 75 at the peak of the day.

  The visibility was limitless.

  From sunrise, September 11, 2001, was a perfect day for flying.

  • • •

  Alison was no stranger to premonitions.

  They started when she was sixteen years old, still in high school. As alien and sudden visions they came, without any interpreter or code. She was uncertain how to react to them at first, beyond the cold knife of fear. Were they meant to be understood as warnings or instruction, as signs to guide toward or away from the next given hour or day? How would others judge her for receiving the visions? Could she describe or explain them without sounding absurd? Should she let anyone know? How would she respond if they doubted or dismissed them? Or her? She learned to accept them, trying to interpret their meaning rather than deny their power.

  But the night of September 10 was something else. The anxiety came on with a force she’d never experienced. It was pushing her past worry, into panic.

  She thought she was falling apart. Getting out of bed, going downstairs, she tried to calm herself by writing her feelings down on the computer, but the screen appeared fragmented to her. She went back upstairs, into bed, and tried to sleep. It was fruitless.

  Up before six, she decided to go for an early morning workout at a fitness club. She would be spending the day at her office in Briarcliff Manor, New York, planning for an upcoming business meeting with the president of the company she worked for. She left before the peak of the rush hour arrived. Driving across the Tappan Zee Bridge, the premonition came to her again, this time in a sentence.

  You’re going to die today, the voice said to her.

  “I felt like my chest opened up,” she recounted years later, “and a brilliant light shot out. I’m suddenly in this cloudy place above myself, but I was in complete serene and utter peace.” It was 7:00 A.M. on the morning of September 11. Alison continued to drive across the bridge beneath the blue dome of sky.

  • • •

  Jeff Crowther was going golfing. The bank where he worked had purchased the tee time in a benefit outing scheduled to begin later in the morning. It was the usual agenda. Breakfast. Pairings. Driving range. Shotgun start. Drinks and prizes after the round. A good day for a man who didn’t get enough days on the links. Jeff was making his final preparations, getting ready to leave the house, when the phone rang. It was his older brother Bosley, calling from Virginia.

  “Hey, are you watching TV?”

  • • •

  Jimmy Dunne was already playing golf early that morning, to the surprise of exactly no one who knew him. The game registered somewhere between fixation and mania for Dunne, and he practiced and played that way. As a pursuit, this fit his general worldview and life’s philosophy. Do everything, all the time, absolutely as hard as you can. Golf can prove resistant to such an approach. For most, a talent for the game needs a measure of conjuring, or nurturing. Dunne didn’t traffic in such beliefs. Forty-four years old, he believed the world largely yielded to will. Much of his life, and his game, was proof.

  Growing up in Babylon on Long Island, he played his early rounds on the municipal courses nearby, like Dix Hills and Sunken Meadow, and caddied before he became a teenager, before his family joined Southward Ho Country Club in Bay Shore.

  As he climbed his way through a career, with success coming quickly as a Wall Street bond trader, his passion for the game deepened. With that success came access to some of the greatest courses in the world, the ones that inspired envy and awe for the legions who would never play them. In time, he would be a member at Pine Valley, Shinnecock Hills, and Augusta National.

  Dunne’s obsession with golf likely saved his life. The night before, he told his mentor, Herman Sandler, that he wasn’t coming into the office the next morning. Sandler hardly needed to ask where Dunne would be. He worked hard enough at golf to possess a 1-handicap, trending toward scratch, and was trying to qualify for the United States Mid-Amateur Championship for the first time.

  Created for nonprofessionals over the age of twenty-five, the event was designed to be a venue for players who had careers and families, not PGA Tour cards and endorsement contracts. It gave strong players with otherwise busy lives a prize to chase. Run by the United States Golf Association, it drew elite amateurs into competition against one another. The championship was set for a club course in Fresno, California, the second week of October, barely a month away. Dunne was determined to qualify.

  That morning, he was at the Bedford Golf and Tennis Club, an hour north of New York City, already on his sixth or seventh hole of the day. A man with a walkie-talkie approached him. The intrusion during a round was unusual for any golfer, and borderline heresy for Dunne. Immediately, it drew his mind to worry if something had happened to his family.

  “Are my kids okay? Is my wife okay?”

  Yes.

  Assuming the matter was not urgent, Dunne turned back
to the hole and played two more shots, until the man with the walkie-talkie grew insistent. “You need to call your office,” he said. “Now.

  “This has nothing to do with business. A plane hit your building.”

  • • •

  They came to the towers that morning with their birthmarks and degrees, allegiances and scars, student loans and night cravings. They came with their loves cherished and lost, fights joined and surrendered, bills paid and put off. They came from different paths, took different chances, practiced different faiths, savored different meals. They came with deals made, lines drawn, ventures failed, disciplines mastered, addictions enabled, orders given, cheers shouted, ideas grasped, fears hidden, reports filed, hours wasted, hearts thrilled, children birthed, time served, hopes lost. Breaths taken. Breaths held.

  There were 14,154 people in the World Trade Center that morning. It was a city unto itself. The towers totaled 220 floors of Manhattan real estate. Each floor was nearly an acre of space—roughly equivalent to the size of a football field, the fields were stacked on top of each other, separated by twelve feet of steel and a floor number.

  They arrived from every direction, after grueling commutes on the Long Island Expressway and traffic clogs in the Holland Tunnel, by the lettered and numbered lines of the subway, in the PATH trains sliding beneath the Hudson and on the Staten Island Ferry churning across its waters, out of the gridlocked streets east of the Battery and out of cabs that stopped along West Street.

  Welles was one among the fourteen thousand. He left his apartment on Washington Place in the West Village around seven that morning, as he usually did, his suit and tie straight out of the cleaner’s plastic. From the time he started at Sandler, he liked to arrive at the office early to get a jump on the day, for the impression it created, and for the savings. The firm often served a great breakfast spread, and Welles didn’t like to miss out. The food was good, and the price was better.

  It was little more than a mile and a half from his door to the entrances of 2 World Trade, his tower. There were different ways to make the commute, depending on the day, the weather, the mood, the first meeting. He could hoof it over to the subway station at Christopher Street and Sheridan Square along Seventh Avenue, less than a five-minute walk from the apartment. There he’d disappear from the street, down the steps, to catch the southbound local, the 1 train. He could step out of his building and hop in a cab if he wanted to save a bit of time and spend a bit more pocket cash, but he’d need some luck to find an empty taxi in the morning rush.

  Or, on a morning like this, he might have walked. Either way, he didn’t want to be late.

  • • •

  He was gone.

  When Chuck Platz woke up on the morning of September 11, Welles had already left the apartment. Platz’s bedroom was next to the bathroom, and often he heard the sounds of his roommate’s morning rituals, the shower and shave that started his day. In this regard, Welles was considerate of his cotenant, down to the detail of often waiting to put his shoes on only after leaving the apartment, to minimize the noise.

  The first signal came more than an hour after Welles had closed the door, when Platz was in the bathroom. He’d long ago grown used to the din of the city; it was an unconscious static, a frequency he’d learned to block but for the shrillest notes. He was standing at the bathroom sink, shaving, when he heard a sound that shook the bones of the room itself, rattling the glass in the mirror, a roar that forced him to tense his upper body, as if bracing for a blow. It was an airplane.

  As if following the sound, Platz left the bathroom, walked into the bedroom, and looked south from the window. As he had done so many times before, he found the spot that granted the best vantage of the Trade Center. He saw the tops of the towers. One of them was on fire.

  He rushed to get dressed and headed down the five flights out the entryway of the building and onto the street. The first person who spoke to him was a crossing guard for the Academy of St. Joseph, an elementary school next to the apartment building. He could hear others already talking about a bomb going off downtown, or accounts of a small plane hitting one of the towers, but the guard, still looking skyward, was definitive.

  “That wasn’t a bomb,” she said. “It was a big plane.”

  For an instant, or perhaps it was a minute—it was an interval he’d never be able to measure or forget—he stood still on Washington Place, lost, staring at the burning hole on the face of the North Tower, like so many others around him. The sight was at once vivid and impossible, a vision beyond comprehension, yet demanding of some urgent response.

  His mind cleared with a single name: Welles.

  • • •

  Natalie McIver was tired. The pregnancy was thrilling, of course, but also exhausting, and by the last trimester there were mornings when it was difficult to summon the energy to start the day and all its routines, to get up, get herself together, get dressed, get out the door, and get down to the ferry to make the trip across the river, to get into the lobby and get the elevator and go all the way up to very near the top of the South Tower.

  She had another reason to be tired. For the past two and a half weeks, she’d been working without one of her key colleagues by her side. Sharon Moore, a vice president and research analyst at Sandler, had taken a vacation in advance of McIver’s maternity leave. She would be out for an extended time—her plan was to take three months—and Moore wanted to get her own R&R in before she left.

  The two understood each other’s schedules and worked well together. Typically, they worked a type of split shift. One always had to be in especially early, by seven, to cover premarket open meetings, and would then leave the office by four, at least in theory. The other would come in later, by nine, and head out by five-thirty or six. They traded back and forth between the shifts.

  The past two weeks without Moore were hard for McIver. She was past seven months pregnant, coming in early and staying late, essentially covering both shifts. She knew it was part of the deal, but still, it was tiring. She had been working on the details of a conference scheduled for September 13 at Le Parker Meridien hotel in Midtown, arranging the logistics for all those planning to attend—guests, bankers, speakers, and the firm’s senior leadership. Her plan was to come in at seven the entire week. She didn’t want to burden Moore, just coming back from vacation, by dumping a truckload of details on her desk about a conference happening in two days.

  But today, finally, was Moore’s first day back from vacation, and despite McIver’s intention to be in early, her body argued for another hour of sleep. She listened to it, deciding she would make it in by nine. After getting up and out of the apartment in Jersey City, almost directly across the Hudson from the Trade Center, she made the walk to the ferry for the ride across the river. She’d be glad to see Moore, to hear about her vacation and catch up a bit about her teenage son, Lance, and of course to get some needed reinforcement for the work ahead.

  She stepped on the ferry for the short trip east, taking in the magnificence of the day. On the water, she heard a strange thunder in the blue sky.

  She looked up, and saw the plane. It was very low.

  • • •

  Ling Young was walking across very familiar ground. She was an auditor for the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, an agency that had called the Trade Center home almost since the towers’ inception, with a hiatus during the nineties when it relocated to Brooklyn. The department returned to Lower Manhattan in 1999, claiming space on the 86th and 87th floors of the South Tower.

  Young’s work was primarily out in the field, performing audits on individuals and corporations, handling all manner of tax-return compliance issues. Today, she was coming in, and heading up to the 86th floor.

  Forty-nine years old, she still found her trips to the Trade Center vaguely exciting, the complex buzzing with humanity, so many lives crossing in its conc
ourses and open spaces. Her only apprehension, if there was any, was rooted in the 1993 terrorist attack there, when the offices were across the East River. She was grateful not to have been in the towers that February day, but the terror of it all still registered with her, if dimly, when she reported to 2 World Trade.

  Young reached her office before eight A.M. Less than an hour later, she was talking with a supervisor when their conversation broke off in midsentence. Each looked at the other, startled into silence. She swore the sound was an explosion.

  • • •

  Judy Wein was in earlier than Ling Young and stationed higher in the building. Wein, forty-five years old, a senior vice president at Aon Corporation, had been with the company in its different identities since 1978, earning an MBA as she rose to the executive suite. That September morning, she commuted in from Queens with her husband, Gerry Sussman, as they did most workdays. Gerry was an appeals officer for the Internal Revenue Service, and Judy was in risk assessment for Aon, doing actuarial work. For Judy, the work was both rewarding and grinding; she was a significant producer, typically billing eighteen hundred hours or more a year. That volume required long days, usually starting before seven A.M. and not wrapping until after six P.M.

  That morning, after getting to Lower Manhattan, the couple walked together to City Hall and stopped to kiss each other good-bye. Judy went off to her corner office on the 103rd floor of 2 World Trade. Her view faced west, out over the Hudson to New Jersey, and on a day this clear, seemingly beyond. Toward the north, a part of 1 World Trade blocked a stretch of horizon. She ate breakfast in the office, a healthy plate of yogurt and fruit. The early stages of the day held nothing more than the ordinary rituals and requirements of her high-powered job, and soon she found herself under the spell of the numbers that governed her working life. It could take an unusual sound to break the trance. About an hour and a half after she arrived that morning, she heard such a noise—a massive boom coming right outside the window.